Barbara Speaks to Mum

Barbara Speaks to Mum

Artist
FAHEY, Jacqueline, 1929-
Date
1986
Description
Painting
Title
Barbara Speaks to Mum
Format
Mixed media on paper
Dimension
510 x 1045mm

With her husband the eminent psychiatrist Fraser McDonald, Jacqueline Fahey lived her married life in hospital houses until 1984.

Moving to French Bay in Titirangi after a decade living at Carrington, where Fraser was Medical Superintendant, Fahey continued to use her domestic life as the subject matter for her work. Often, fraught family relationships directed her pictorial narratives, with the artist invoking classical mythology to give her imagery resonance.

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In this instance, the three figures depicted are her elder sister, Barbara, who wears the hat in the foreground and gestures through a patch of sunshine yellow; the artist’s youngest daughter, Emily, sitting back on the couch with her feet up on the Victorian deal table, and the matriarch Margaret Fahey, seen in profile at right, seated in a roll arm chair. In the recently-published second volume of Jacqueline Fahey’s autobiography, Before I Forget, there is an explanation of the greater significance of this grouping: “Mum had stayed with us at Carrington after a fall once, and I’d done a lot of drawings of her. Back in Carrington then I’d had a lot to do looking after her and I didn’t want to stress myself out, so I had stopped painting. But I could not control my looking and seeing and From Porirua Mental Hospital to Melbourne (where Fraser trained as a psychiatrist), and from Kingseat Hospital to Carrington (where Jacqueline had a run-in with Titewhai Harawira), she describes a brimming, shifting life of family, politics, ideals and art. A distinguished artist, especially known for her paintings of domestic and suburban life, Jacqueline Fahey is also a writer. She was one of the first New Zealand artists to work explicitly from a woman’s perspective and in the late 1980s became an influential lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts. took to drawing again, often random and on-the-hoof stuff. Now in Titirangi, seeing more of Mum, those drawings came back to me.” This explains the sketchy, seemingly unfinished aspect of this work, where black outlines predominate and the colouring has been abandoned. A shallow interior space gives on to two large picture windows at the back, with fluffy clouds in a blue sky and a flash of green bush visible, the serenity of nature beyond the living room contrasting with the chaos within it. With its profusion of diagonals and tangle of lines, the scene spills toward the viewer like a tilting stage set.

Aspects of the tableau are recognisable as symbols of the traditional realm of the unrelenting tasks of housewifery: the basket of unfolded washing in its wicker basket and the skeins of wool on the floor. Flitting birds, found elsewhere in Fahey’s work where female characters are shown speaking, animate the air in concordance with the gesturing of Barbara’s left hand. Central to the composition is the three-legged Victorian gypsy fortune-telling table, topped by letters, with its silken fringe fiercely bristling, recognisable from a photographic portrait of Jacqueline Fahey made in 1987. Beneath one of the bobbin-turned legs, capitalised letters spell out the work’s title. Rather than suggesting that Barbara is a modern-day soothsayer, the tripod table’s role is to point to the nature of threes, showing how these women can be seen as a kind of Holy Trinity.

“MUM” is writ large, but indistinctly, and similarly, the mother figure is almost indecipherable, hidden beneath foliage and scribbled lines. Only her stoic profile seems resolutely described. In a recent radio interview, Fahey explained that although she frequently saw her mother (who lived well into her ninth decade), they were estranged until almost the end of Margaret Fahey’s life. Here the artist is the dispassionate observer, using her imagemaking skills to configure the emotionally charged mother-daughter relationship as universally significant. Before I Forget offers insight into the intent of this imagery of mother, daughter, grand-daughter: “Out of that messy collection [of drawings] came something consistent: a sort of Greek tragedy-cum-King Lear rendering of my mother’s decline. Her handmaidens in her travails were my daughter Emily and my sister Barbara. They were placating, soothing, and distressed in themselves. A grieving Greek chorus. Now in Titirangi I was able to resolve the compositions and carry those ideas to fruition…The maiden, the mature woman and the hag. A female holy trinity, an eternal cycle. Her shrines had been established at waterfalls in Ireland. Later the new priests of Christianity replaced her with the Virgin Mary.” Typically, Fahey loops back from her own relationships through Catholicism to invoke her Irish ancestry, giving a political and religious twist to her narrative of connection, while noisily dispelling the ideal of intergenerational familial harmony.

The Artist

Jacqueline Fahey was a lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland during the 1980s and 90s. She began her studies at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch, where she was taught by the illustrator Russell Clark. She started painting during the 1950s but had three children in quick succession, which temporarily halted her painting career. Fahey was one of the first NZ female artists to paint from a women's perspective, expressing feminist concerns. During the 1950s, her feminist subject matter was highly unconventional, which found her later moving on to the subject of politics and urbanisation. She was selected in 1985 to represent NZ at the Sydney Perspecta. Fahey has been involved in the publication of a few books such as Cutting Loose (1998), Something for the Birds (2006) and Before I Forget (2012). Fahey was named Officer of the Order for her services to art in 1997. She also received an Arts Foundation Icon Award, which is an award usually reserved to 20 incredible NZ artists and is known as one of the Arts Foundations' highest honour.

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